ISSN 1444­3775 2003 Issue No. 07 — New Media Technologies Weblogs, warblogs, the public sphere, and bubbles By Garry Thompson Introduction Weblogs and the public sphere, part 1 Warblogging, the weblog frenzy that has accompanied the latest Iraq war, has put blogging in the news as never before. It's perhaps an even bigger boost to the genre than the Trent Lott affair. Are warblogs something really new? Or are they just another wrinkle? (O’Reilly) Blogging—the keeping of weblogs, an electronic genre combining features of news portal, personal journal, and selective index to the world wide web—has made a place for itself as a means of gathering information about and commenting on public and private events. The two examples cited in the O’Reilly conference announcement above, the short-lived scandal in the US over Sen. Trent Lott’s nostalgia for segregation, and the flurry of writings in support of or against the second US war against Iraq, demonstrate its potential for modifying and influencing mainstream news coverage. Since it came to public awareness in the mid-1990s, the Internet has tantalized those interested in communications and media with its potential for realizing Habermas’ public sphere. By “public sphere,” we mean first of all a domain of our social life in which such a thing as public opinion can be formed. Access to the public sphere is open in principle to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere is constituted in every conversation in which private persons come together to form a public. They are then acting neither as business or professional people conducting their private affairs, nor as legal consociates subject to the legal regulations of a state bureaucracy and obligated to obedience. (p. 398) The term public sphere appears as a kind of buzzword or godterm, inviting nearuniversal approval because of its flexibility in fitting into different (positive) contexts. The public sphere developed in the context of the Enlightenment, changing significantly with the development of democracy along with mass media; subsequent change is all around us with further developments in electronic technology. Habermas distinguishes between “mere opinions” and “public opinion”: the latter requires “a public that engages in rational discussion” (p. 399). Established news organizations are commonly the dominant sources for information needed for the public sphere to flourish; they are, however, almost exclusively one-way channels, and given the social organizations of contemporary Western society too few venues exist for the equivalent of 18th-century coffee-houses and salons. Weblogs are one type of web text that offer more open participation in an electronic public sphere. In contrast to print and broadcast media, they allow or encourage two-way communication. Much of what has been observed about the democratic potential of web texts generally applies to weblogs as well. Some of the early research on the text-based Internet (e.g., MUDs, e-mail, chat, IRC) points to characteristics that also apply to weblogs, particularly those which have comment features or which are collectively authored. Weblogs are commonly pseudonymous, with different degrees of disguise ranging from complete concealment to open secret, to persona, to actual professional name—as is common in text-based communications. Depending on the venue, the writers’ personae may be highly performative, with irony, satire, sarcasm, and invective commonly present, particularly in communal weblogs such as Fark.com and Metafilter. Patricia Wallace’s observation that “The Internet is an identity laboratory” (p. 48) is well illustrated in such cases. Some features of weblogs are consistent with observations about other Internet texts. They are ephemeral and responsive to what’s happening at the moment (faster than print and other media); they offer two-way interaction; they promote group identification and community. This so-called virtual community, however, has good and bad dimensions: it often promotes what Habermas calls “mere opinion” rather than “public opinion” (p. 399). (Regardless of whether the persona is identified by name or pseudonym, weblog audiences have to judge how they contribute to the dialogue on public issues—increasingly the case with mainstream news media as well, as indicated by the conservative tilt in US news media such as Fox News.) Features of group dynamics such as polarization and flaming, particularly on political subjects, are amply represented both across weblogs which refer to each other and within forums on news-oriented websites. Weblogs are virtually local. That is, they are generally written by individuals, giving a singular perspective on their subjects and they attract a specific set of regular readers and those linking to them, making up a virtual community. There are often local references and photos as well but the weblogs themselves are accessible worldwide. Weblogs as a genre illustrate how new technological capabilities interact with social conditions and institutions to enable new types of media. At this point it is unclear whether they will serve as a counter to media convergence and consolidation, allowing underrepresented and marginalized positions to be represented or whether they will serve to reinforce dominant ideology by multiplying its point sources. If we read selectively, concentrating on weblogs that adopt a serious, responsible tone, we can find aspects of the utopian public sphere invoked by Habermas. If, however, we read more broadly among weblogs, we are likely to find not a public sphere but a lot of bubbles isolating writers by ideology. Weblogs and the public sphere, part 2 The Internet is open to all (at least all with the electronic resources), and the search results from almost any term or phrase among the three billion indexed on Google reinforce the appearance of electronic democracy. However, with the Internet’s increased commercialization beginning in the mid-90s, most audiences experience the Internet as a bifurcation between mostly text-based e- mail, chat, listservs and forums, and mostly hypertext, partly pictorial websites, many of which offer content from established commercial institutions. Weblogs offer an intermediate form between these. Commonly they incorporate design features resembling those of better-known informational websites--use of tables, layers, or frames to separate content; use of color, images, differing fonts, and other textual design to create visual interest; links as reference points. However, they frequently provide an individualized voice and perspective not evident in news websites, they are sometimes attentive to aspects of news coverage and events absent from mainstream media coverage and their greater political specificity can build audience identification and loyalty. Weblogs use permalinks to refer readers to other weblogs, commonly those which feature related ideological perspectives. Of particular importance to weblogs is their capacity to facilitate two-way communication through comment features or, more significantly, collective authorship. A few books and journalistic articles have appeared in the last few years about weblogs but, to adapt T. S. Eliot’s phrase, these often get the meaning but miss the experience. Reading around in the best of weblog entries combines something of the feel of first-rate, on the scene reporting, crisp autobiography, intimate personal journals, acute social commentary, beat coffeehouses circa 1956; however, “best” is open to wide subjectivity and most readers’ first reactions when browsing weblogs randomly is to say, “What is all this crap?” Weblog authors do not have to deal with editors: all aspects from design to content to fact-checking are done by the author. The result is content which can be highly imaginative and which can be dubious in both accuracy and taste. The development and form of weblogs supports the libertarian view of the Internet as best left unregulated (except for the structural form of regulation which is code). (See Warnick, esp. pp. 19- 61.) There are an estimated half million weblogs— although numbers are necessarily imprecise and subject to fluctuation since most weblogs start up, run a few weeks or months and then become inactive as their authors stop posting. Several books and articles describing weblogs for the general public appeared in 2002, including Bausch, Haughey, and Hourihan's We Blog and Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook. The term weblog derives from the early function of logging websites, beginning with Jorn Barger’s Robotwisdom in Dec. 1997 (Blood, p. 3); the phenomenon intensified in 1999 with early bloghosts such as Pitas and Blogger and with articles in mainstream print media. Descriptions for the general public start with generic conventions-- new entries at the top with frequent updates, links to other sites usually in a layer or frame at the side, and generally a personal tone. Attempts to define weblogs by content are readily defeated but defining them by form is as pointless as defining novels by page count and layout. A representative reaction to this mainstreaming of weblogs (in this case, to Hourihan’s article adapted from We Blog for O’Reilly) might be that of Stavros, whose comments accentuate the sense of distinction bloggers feel between their genre or medium and mainstream publishing: How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the- numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom- designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants. My ungracious guess is that it's just what the publishing industry would like to read, before the Blogroots-related book comes out. Antithetical to the spirit of what so many of us, you included, I thought, were doing... (Emptybottle) Weblogs are indexed—among other places, by the MIT Media Laboratory's Blogdex, allowing researchers and other curious folk to examine traffic between weblogs and outside to websites and news items referenced.